A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (19 page)

There were a number of outraged squeaks from England; a few dispatches appeared in
The Times
to be answered rather surprisingly by a Miss Lillias Hamilton, M.D., Doctor to the Amir’s Court, a resourceful woman who had introduced vaccination to the country and founded a hospital at Kabul.
¹
The main point of her letter was that anyone judging what had happened to the Kafirs by English standards of ethics was talking through his hat.

There were many protests from missionaries to whom the Amir replied, blandly: ‘I did not find any Christians among them.’

It was a little difficult for the Government to censure Abdur Rahman. Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000
to 16,000 lakhs of rupees. To the British he had fully justified their selection of him as Amir of Afghanistan and, apart from the few foibles remarked by Lord Curzon, like flaying people alive who displeased him, blowing them from the mouths of cannon, or standing them up to the neck in pools of water on the summits of high mountains and letting them freeze solid, he had done nothing to which exception could be taken. Nothing happened – a curtain descended on Kafiristan. The next time it would rise on Nuristan, The Country of Light.

We passed a steep valley on the right leading to Mir Samir and for a moment we saw the top of it remote-looking and inaccessible far away to the west. Above us an eagle glided along the crests.

Here at this small valley junction we came to the first of five suicidal bridges, at each of which the track crossed from one bank to the other. They were all exactly the same, a single juniper trunk more than twenty feet long, split in half and extended over the torrent by cantilevers of wood and stone. Because the trunks rested on their round sides, they wobbled from side to side when trodden on in an alarming manner.

But it was the unfortunate horses who really suffered. They had been really happy in the meadow higher up. Now they had to swim for their lives with their loads half under water, sometimes downstream of a bridge, sometimes far above it, whilst Badar Khan and Abdul Ghiyas shouted encouragement from the bank. But not Shir Muhammad; his little grey mare was the only one the other horses would follow, so that it was she who had to swim while her master sat with his feet tucked up on the saddle. Why his was the most spirited horse no one ever discovered. Not only did he allow it to wander on without giving it any help or encouragement but by sheer neglect it became horribly galled under the saddle. It was only the last bridge made from two parallel
tree-trunks with rocks in the space between them (the trunks were crooked) that they were able to cross at all, at the rest they were made to flounder miserably in the river.

At this last bridge we came on an old bearded man sitting under a willow tree with two small boys, who were both wearing waistcoats with orange backs and oatmeal hats several sizes too large for them. With his two grandchildren he had made the journey up from Pushal, the capital, to meet us. This was the
Isteqbal
– the traditional journey of half a stage – that is made by people in the Moslem world to greet a friend who is travelling. The old man was Sultan Muhammad Khan, an ex-captain of the Royal Afghan Bodyguard, who although born a Kafir, had learned this pleasant custom in the years when he was at Court and had come up to escort us to his house, the news of our arrival having been brought to him by the disagreeable man on the horse.

After we had sat with him for some time in the shade of the willow tree, he proposed that we should continue.

‘It is only a short walk,’ he remarked.

Thinking that it might be perhaps a matter of half an hour we set off. The journey took seven hours.

We emerged from the Chamar gorge at a place where it joined another river, the Bugulchi, that rises under the main Hindu Kush range and leads into a part of Badakshan so remote that even the quarter-inch map showed a large unsurveyed blank, and entered the valley of the Ramgul, long and narrow between jagged mountains and thickly wooded with holly oak; crossed the last bridge before the Chamar joined the Ramgul and then, horror, started to climb again up a steep, dusty valley full of bushes on which grew a stalkless fruit, red like a cherry but more bitter, until we came out on a hillside among terraced fields of wheat and barley still young and green, deserted in the midday heat.

Soon even these evidences of human occupation ceased and
the track wound interminably along a desolate hillside dotted with the stumps of dead and dying juniper trees, like the remains of a forest destroyed by shell-fire. The heat was appalling. We both had a raging thirst but there was no water, except where five hundred feet below the Ramgul raced down, as green as the fields on either side of it, mocking us. Only the Captain and his two small grandsons seemed impervious to heat and distance, racing ahead and then waiting courteously at the difficult bits to allow Hugh and myself to go first, so that at each steep place we all stood bowing and smiling politely at one another until I could have screamed.

After four hours of this the track descended steeply to the river and we met the first women we had seen in Nuristan. All were unveiled, but it was difficult to form any opinion about their charms because, as they passed us, staggering under the weight of enormous conical wicker baskets piled eight feet high with firewood, they latched a cloth across their faces. Dressed in dark brown coats with wide sleeves, like the fringed
bezih
worn by the men in the
aylaq,
and with a sort of hood of the same material, they looked like overworked members of some austere religious order.

At a narrow place between the river and the steep side of the mountain we crossed a stone wall built of round stones the size of cannon balls. Originally it must have been extremely solid, now it was broken down, indistinguishable from the ones that divided the path from the fields on either side.

‘Here were the outer forts of Pushal,’ said the Captain, ‘but after we were conquered by the Afghans, they were broken and thrown down.

‘And there is your camp site,’ he added.

‘And about time, too,’ said Hugh in English. Like me he was at the end of his tether. Apart from short halts we had been on the
move since six. It was now four-thirty and we had not eaten all day.

It was a splendid camp site in a field by the river and was shaded by a vast walnut tree. It was the camp site of our dreams – but Abdul Ghiyas rejected it. Now that the Captain had taken us under his protection and the risk of assassination had receded, he was anxious for the bright lights of the city. We were too tired to argue with him.

The next possible place was in a grove of mulberry trees. It was full of girls and young women. There had been an air of sadness about the others in their drab working clothes: these were far more gay. They wore white and red trousers with red dresses over them. Under their skirts they wore petticoats with contrasting hems which showed. Their hair was covered with a sort of cream-coloured coif and under it they seemed to wear some kind of cotton cap. Their arms were bare and they wore heavy bracelets of brass or gold. On their foreheads they mostly had a fillet of round silver ornaments or cowrie shells. They were barefooted. Even at a distance it was obvious that they were extremely handsome.

Some carried babies on their backs in the sack made by the turned-down hoods they wore. The really small ones were asleep in the conical carrying baskets or in small wooden beds, like the baskets suspended on ropes from the trees. One girl was seated on a swing. As she swung high up under the trees she shrieked and showed her petticoats. It was an innocent happy scene.

‘Here,’ we said instantly.

‘No,’ said Abdul Ghiyas, looking at the Captain out of the corner of his eyes. ‘It is not suitable.’ It must have been a hard tussle for him to set a good example to the Infidel at this moment.

‘Not suitable,’ said the Captain. Here he left us and hurried on home.

Eventually Abdul Ghiyas chose an awful place for us. It was in an amphitheatre under some cliffs and had previously been used in the time of the old religion as a place of sacrifice, but there the resemblance to something out of the Golden Bough ended. It was a dusty place covered with excrement and squashed mulberries. There were flies by the million, fierce black ants and, when the sun went down, large blood-thirsty mosquitoes. The raffish youths who watched us as we slowly set up our camp, the dust and the general air of stickiness, made me think of Clapham Common and Bank Holidays.

But, as the news of our arrival spread, the smart young men of the town began to arrive. Half a dozen of the most elegant seated themselves on a large rock and watched us languidly. Like members of the Eton Society, they were dressed rather foppishly – big flat caps, embroidered waistcoats, silver medals and lucky charms. One of them was armed with a double stringed stone bow. From time to time he discharged a pebble at the lizards that crawled over the face of the cliff.

Before these aloof dandies and an audience of at least fifty lesser men we hobbled backwards and forwards, performing our mundane household chores, like actors in some interminable drama in an experimental theatre, until, unable to stand it any longer, we set off to wash in the river.

‘God. You’re thin!’ Hugh said.

It was the first time we had taken our clothes off for a fortnight. During this time our bodies had become unrecognizable. High altitude, insufficient liquid and the wrong food had wrought an extraordinary change. All the muscles in our arms and legs had melted away to nothing – they were like matchsticks. Our ribs were starting through the flesh. We were as repulsive as the survivors of a journey in open boats.

‘If von Dückelmann only began to lose weight when he got to
Nuristan, I can’t bear to think what we shall look like in another ten days.’

‘If the rest of Nuristan is like the place we’re camping in, we shan’t be alive to find out,’ Hugh said. His teeth were chattering. So were mine.

We were standing up to our waists in a bay of the river, the only possible wash place. The water was bloody cold. The current moved in a circle so that the dirt remained where it was. We had already lost the soap.

Back at the amphitheatre a game had started – a game of quoits called
auzil.
Like everything else these people did, it took an excessive Herculean form and consisted of hurling heavy flat stones the size of soup plates at a mark the length of a cricket pitch away. When a particularly good shot resulted loud cheers rose.

Meanwhile the boys, who infested the place, were amusing themselves in their own fashion; creeping up behind someone smaller than themselves and violently hurling him to the ground, where the victim would lie blubbering for a few moments until he himself would get up and do the same to someone even more diminutive.

Whilst Abdul Ghiyas held off the spectators who fought among themselves for the empty tins, I started to cook. Unable to stand the thought of Irish stew, and as a revenge on our drivers for forcing us to camp in this spot, I concocted a loathsome mixture of soup and pork which I knew would be unacceptable to them on religious grounds.

The food no sooner started to warm up than a whirlwind descended on the amphitheatre, which extinguished the stoves and covered everything in dust. To escape from it I moved everything to the shelter of some smelly rocks at the foot of the cliff. In this unbelievably horrid situation I finished cooking our dinner.

‘Apparently this place belongs to a Nuristani General who lives
at Kabul,’ Hugh said as we digested the ghastly dinner I had prepared.

‘Well, if I were a General I’d get a fatigue party to clean it up.’

When we had finished we gave out chocolate to the watchers, but it was like attempting to feed the five thousand without the aid of a miracle.

It had been among the most awful days I could remember. To escape from the crowds, who showed no signs of dispersing, and from the giant mosquitoes that were sucking my blood, I took my bedding to the top of a high rock.

‘If anything falls from the cliff you’ll be killed,’ Hugh shouted up to me.

‘Good!’

‘Abdul Ghiyas says if you sleep up there you may be murdered.’

‘It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’

He picked up his own bedding and started to move towards the cliff.

‘I’m coming up there, too.’

‘Why don’t you find a rock of your own? I need this one myself.’

‘All right, I will,’ he said huffily.

Before falling asleep, having long since lost all sense of time, I looked at the calendar in my diary. The date was the twenty-third of July. Only fourteen days had passed since we had set off from Kabul. It seemed like a lifetime.

By half past four the following morning a large audience had already gathered and was waiting with ill-concealed impatience for the curtain to rise.

Soon, bursting with energy, butter-carriers going on leave from the
aylaq
began to trot into the arena. It was difficult at this hour to greet them with much warmth.

Breakfast was an abomination: sugarless tea, chocolate that had melted and set again, and some old mutton
kebab,
a hangover from
Id-i-Qorban
that Abdul Ghiyas had conserved for such an emergency. There was no bread; Shir Muhammad having eaten the lot in the night.

Whilst we were eating, a tremendous wind began to blow up the valley from the south. Like magic the audience began to disperse uttering cries of warning, while girls, previously invisible, who had been working in the fields, scuttled for home emitting tiny frightened squeaks. It was obvious that some cataclysm was at hand.

Soon we were at the centre of a violent storm. There was a continuous rumbling and forks of lightning tore down on us from
the sky. With the background of bulbous rocks, beetling cliffs and twisted junipers it was like a landscape by a Chinese painter of the thirteenth century.

Thunder and lightning were succeeded by torrents of rain. Crouching under one of the rocks we each smoked our last cigarette. My pipe was somewhere on Mir Samir; Hugh had dropped his in the Chamar. At any rate we had no more tobacco.

When the rain stopped a small boy who spoke Persian arrived with a message from the Captain inviting us to his house. After packing everything we set off with him, each of us enveloped in an aura of steam that proceeded from our wet clothes as they dried in the hot sun.

He was an odious little boy; the sort whose very appearance invites ill-treatment. Unwisely he decided to play a practical joke. After leading us through a maze of sodden undergrowth he eventually returned us to the place where we had started.

All the time, as we floundered after this juvenile delinquent, Hugh had been getting more and more red in the face and breathing heavily.

‘What is the reason for this?’ he said.

The boy laughed and stuck out his tongue.

‘You little—. Take that!’ said Hugh, ‘and that! … and that! … and that!’

It seemed to make very little impression on him. His bottom and ears seemed to be made of cast iron. All the way up the steep climb to Pushal he continued to loiter and Hugh continued to cuff him. In this way, profoundly depressed, hating Hugh and the little boy equally, I arrived at Pushal, the capital of the Ramgul Katirs.

Knowing something of the irregular way of life pursued by the Kafirs before the conquest, it was easy to see that strategic considerations alone had governed the choice of the site on which it
stood, a large rock poised above the river. On the rock, in indescribable confusion, the houses were piled one atop the other like stone boxes, many of them two-storied, with large unglazed windows and some with little galleries, which overhung the river supported by wooden struts.

There was no main street in Pushal because no two houses were at the same level. The way through it was like a gully, far too steep even for our horses, which had had to cross the river and ford it again lower down beyond the town. There were no shops, no
chaie khana
but, as in Panjshir, the roofs were covered with apricots and mulberries. Among the fruit, watching us go by, stood wraithlike figures in white so muffled up that it was impossible to say whether they were men or women.

The Captain’s house was at a place called Asnar, half a mile beyond Pushal, one of several standing among rocks and apricot trees. It was a two-storey building with a slightly pitched roof with boulders on it to stop it blowing away. It was not in fact his house at all but belonged to his son-in-law who came to meet us as we came steaming up followed by the drivers, and escorted us into it.

His name was Abdul Motaleb, which translated means The Slave of the Summoner. Like some of the others here in the capital, he was dressed like a Pathan in white
shalvār
trousers and a turban. He had a soft face, a fine wavy beard and bore no resemblance to any other Nuristani we had so far seen (not that any of them bore much resemblance to one another).

The ground floor of the house was mainly store-rooms. We went up a flight of stone steps on to a platform supported on tree-trunks. Above the door a pair of magnificent ibex horns sprouted from the wall. Like all the other houses I saw in Nuristan it gave me the impression of being still in the course of construction.

The doorway that was partly filled with hurdling was not on the same level with the platform but was a foot or so above it, so that it looked more like a window.

Once over the threshold and inside it was as dark as night. Facing the entrance was the kitchen from which came a dim red glow and a scuttling sound as the owner’s wife made herself scarce. We passed through a bare room slightly less dark with a brokendown bed in it, a wooden framework covered with interlaced woven thongs, like an Indian
charpoy
, then through another completely empty, then into a third, with a large, square window and solid wooden shutters that opened inwards. The shutters, like the double doors, were decorated with crude orange stripes. The floor was of mud; the ceiling laths were willow and were supported by solid beams of poplar, the space between the laths being filled with the dead leaves of the holly oaks that grew in thousands on the mountain-sides. On the wall hung a Martini-Henry rifle with the date 1906 on it and a
jezail
, a heavy Afghan musket with a barrel four feet long.

Soon a boy appeared loaded with carpets and quilts, which he spread on the floor. It was the same little boy whom Hugh had kicked so enthusiastically. As he went out he glared.

‘My son,’ said Abdul Motaleb proudly.

Soon the boy was back. This time he carried two wooden bowls of apricots, one of which he put down in front of Hugh.

‘Have some of these,’ said Hugh with his mouth full. ‘Excellent apricots.’

‘I think I’d prefer to have some from the other basket. After the way you kicked his bottom they’re probably poisoned.’

As we sat there, another storm developed and went rumbling away up the valley. This time it continued to rain steadily. Looking out of the window on to a river in spate and mountains shrouded in mist, I experienced a sensation forgotten since childhood; the
mixture of cosiness and despair that I used to feel looking out from a seaside hotel on a wet day.

Distinguished visitors began to arrive: the Captain, together with a vigorous-looking old man whose beard was dyed with henna, and another like the man with the skull-cap we had met in the upper valley with the hard face of a professional killer.

The old man was very lively, remembering vividly the happenings of sixty years back.

‘I was fifteen years old when the great Amir attacked us. His army was in three columns and we fought with them long and hard, using our bows, spears and swords and what few guns we had.’ (For ‘guns’ he used the word ‘artillery’ and I wondered if they had had some ancient cannon.
¹
) ‘But it made no difference, in the end we were beaten. I and many others were taken prisoner and brought to Kabul as slaves. There I remained twenty-five years; first, while I was still young, as a page at the court of the Amir; later as a bodyguard until the new Amir, his son, was slain at Qala Gosh.’ (This was the Amir Habibullah who was murdered while asleep in a tent on a hunting expedition in the valley of the lower Alingar. I wondered if the bodyguard had been on duty at the time.) ‘When that happened I was allowed to return to the place where I was born.’

‘What do you remember of the life before you were converted, when you were Kafirs?’

‘We used to make wine and hunt bear. There was much killing in those days and I was a great swimmer but I do not remember that time with much pleasure. Now there is no longer any wine made,’ he said rather wistfully.

The coming of Islam to Kafiristan seemed to have had the same deadly effect as Knox and the Reformation on Scotland.

The talk of killing gave the murderous-looking man an opportunity to butt in. It turned out that he had been twelve years a bodyguard to a former prime minister.

‘Have you
ijazat
, permission to be here?’

‘What sort of permission?’

‘Written permission.’

‘Yes.’

‘Here,’ he said happily, ‘we shoot people without permission,’ and went on to tell a gloomy story about an Afghan who had married an American girl and fled with her to Nuristan for sanctuary. It ended badly for both of them. I was not surprised; to me it seemed an unsuitable place to choose for such a purpose.

‘If I didn’t feel so ill, this man would frighten me,’ Hugh said.

By a system of barter too tedious to relate, Abdul Ghiyas, who himself looked like death, obtained a chicken and cooked it together with wild onions and apricots, a mixture which in retrospect sounds awful but at the time seemed very good.

Later, to escape the hoi-polloi who had been admitted to rummage in our belongings, we went for a walk in the rain with two young bloods. They were coarse-looking youths and they had not improved their appearance by painting their eyes red and tinting their eyelids with antimony. They said their names were Shyok and Paluk, at least that is what they sounded like, but they also admitted to more conventional Mussulman names.

Shyok and Paluk were tiresomely fit; hurling great stones about; leaping into the branches of mulberry trees and gibbering down at us, and all the time challenging us to feats of strength that were impossible for people in our condition. By comparison with them we seemed like corpses.

The place seemed deserted. Warned of our arrival women and girls kept out of sight. There were no longer the happy groups of girls playing together. Flitting among the trees were the same
ghostly white figures who had looked down on us from the rooftops of Pushal. They were
mandares,
Theological students from one of the eastern valleys come to the capital of Ramgul to study at a college run by the
mullahs
.

At this moment one of them came into view, a pouting creature with soft doe eyes, running rather feebly, closely pursued by Akuts, our friend with the cut on the nose, and disappeared from view behind some large walnut trees.

Later the Captain visited us. He was very smart in a doublebreasted gaberdine overcoat and wore a turban wound round a flat-topped
kullah
like a pill-box set with coloured stones. With him was the Company Promoter whom we had last seen in the upper valley. He wore a dark brown Chitrali cap, a wine-coloured silk shirt, chaplis from Peshawar and carried an American Carbine.

Because we admired this weapon, news of our interest spread quickly. Men with rifles began to pour into the house: .303 Lee-Enfields identical with the sort issued to the British Army, with the correct-looking serial numbers but marked V.R. 1912, made at the tribal gun factory at Kohat on the frontier (the bolts were genuine). There was a Prussian rifle called a Dreyse with the date 1866 on it, one in which a needle pierces a paper cartridge and strikes a detonating composition between it and the bullet. Where the ammunition for such a weapon came from was a mystery, as it was for the long-barrelled Imperial Russian rifle inlaid with brass and a Canadian Ross rifle. All were in a disgraceful condition, particularly the barrels.

‘I didn’t think you were allowed to have rifles,’ said Hugh.

‘No,’ everyone replied happily and ambiguously, ‘we’re not; but in Nuristan there are many robbers.’

Apart from the work in the summer pastures and the carrying down of the butter, the men seemed to have little to do, most of
the labour in the fields, except for some ploughing, being done by women.

‘In the autumn,’ they said, ‘when the crops are lifted and we bring the horses down from the
aylaq
we play
buz-kashi
. We used a dead goat with its head cut off. It is a very strong game when we play it,’ they said, and all grinned. ‘And we go hunting; and in the winter we sleep.

‘At the
aylaq
,’ they said, ‘we make the butter and curds and store it in the rivers until it is needed. When it is needed we bring it down to the valley and it is boiled. Then it is carried away.’

For some time we had been mystified by what happened to the dairy produce that seemed to be constantly on the move but never eaten. No one ever offered milk or butter to us, nor could we buy any.

‘But what do you do with it?’ we asked them.

‘We have not enough grain to make bread. We take it over the
Kotal
Arayu and down the Panjshir to Gulbahar and exchange it for grain.’

This meant taking it back up the hill again. It seemed crazy to us. I wondered why they didn’t boil it up at the
aylaq
.

‘Are the men who carry it paid anything?’

‘Each man carries four
seer
(about sixty-four pounds) and for each
seer
he receives thirty Afghanis. But that is a short journey; we also go to Kashkar.’

At first we thought they said Kashgar.

‘But that’s in China!’ The thought of a man making such a journey loaded with sixty pounds of butter was impossible to contemplate.

‘They mean Chitral,’ the Captain said. ‘They call Chitral Kashkar. It is a long journey: from Pushal up the Bugulchi, then to the east over the
Kotal
Suan into the country of the Kantiwar people; then by the valley of Kanitwo and into the country of the Presun people;
then eastwards to the head of that river and beyond by the
Kotal
Mrami and the
Kotal
Papruk to the Bashgul river; north again to Dewane Baba (Ahmad Diwana) and then to Kashkar.’

‘How long does it take?’

‘Two days to the Kantiwar; two and a half to Papruk; two days to Dewane Baba and two days by the
Kotal
Semeneck to Kashkar.’

‘What do you exchange your butter for in Kashkar?’

‘For caps.’ Everyone smiled and pointed to his porridge plate.